Just Robbed a Bank

By Tim Scott

The hardest thing to remember when you are a bank robber is that you still look like everybody else. The giant sign that says JUST ROBBED A BANK is not flashing over your head, it is IN your head.

This is a book of stories. Stories I lived before, during, and after becoming a bank robber. And make no mistake, even though I

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tim Scott
• Release date: Jun 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9781087960371

Tim Scott

Tim Scott has learned to follow instructions, but seldom does it without at least some resistance. So when told by his editor that the final thing missing from his first book was the author bio, he pointed out that since the book is a memoir, the entire thing is an author bio. So here we are. That quick irreverence and offbeat command of the obvious makes Tim a favorite among people looking for a story or two, and since he doesn't have time to tell them to everyone, he had to write some down. Just Robbed a Bank is the best of the lot. Through his stories, you will get to know the good and bad and the highs and lows of being a bank robber in modern-well, almost modern-America.

Book preview

Introduction

The first time I robbed a bank, I almost ran.

I had told myself, repeatedly, that when I came out the door there wouldn’t be a flashing light over my head or a sign that said JUST ROBBED A BANK. My intention was to stroll away as if nothing had happened and count on anyone I walked past thinking that indeed nothing had.

It was all going so well as I hit the bank door shoulder first, remembering not to touch it with my hands. I cut into the bank parking lot. I had no doubts there would be someone watching from the drive-up teller’s window. Later, when I had a few banks under my belt, in such a situation I would have waved. The first time at anything is a challenge, so I didn’t think how cool a jaunty wave would have been until it was too late.

All I had to do was cross that parking lot and the street that ran behind the bank, then turn up a side street. My car was parked two doors down and could not be seen from the bank. Proper planning, but simple. Someone was watching out that window and would tell the cops where I went, but by then I’d be long gone. What I couldn’t allow was for the cops to hit that street and run smack into someone saying I saw a weird guy run down the street, get in a car, and blaze off. I wasn’t wearing a JUST ROBBED A BANK sign, but I could give myself one that said WEIRD RUNNING GUY pretty easily.

The snowplows had piled snow along the edges of the street. It covered the curb and flowed onto the sidewalk in a dirty pile. I could hop over it, no problem. As I hit the sidewalk I took a couple of set-up steps; not running, really, but to build for the jump. When I landed, my first boot hit the pavement, then the second … and my body was screaming for me to run and just keep running.

But I didn’t.

There was no way to outrun being a bank robber—I just had to walk away with it.

That bank was in Cheyenne, Wyoming; population forty thousand and change. Forty thousand people, and not one of them knew me. Night clerks at two low-end motels had seen me, but I had given them both a fake name. Both had been told I left my wallet in the car. The first wanted to wait while I went to get it, so I just left. The second had said fine and taken my cash for one night in a ground-floor room. As far as I know, that first clerk is still waiting.

To get to the bank I drove down a street that was clear of snow. The air was cold, but the morning sky held no clouds. Rain or snow might have turned me back. Given me an excuse to reconsider, maybe. Maybe just put me off to another day, or maybe changed the course of my life. No way to tell.

Twenty-four hours earlier I had known nothing more about Cheyenne than I could learn from a Rand McNally road atlas. Small enough to not have big-city paranoia about criminals on every corner, but big enough to be anonymous. An Interstate freeway running through that no one would be stopping traffic on for a low-key bank robber. I wasn’t picky.

I arrived in town the afternoon before the big event and scouted my chosen bank in the early darkness that fell soon after. On the morning of, the daylight didn’t change it much. Sitting at a stoplight, the street stretched straight ahead far enough that individual buildings blurred together, then blurred away completely. The mountains in the distance had that quality where you just know that, if you keep going down that street, the city will eventually end and those mountains will not seem any closer.

I wasn’t going that far. My first choice among the banks I had picked out was on the corner across the street on the right. The light turned green, I drove past the bank, and took the next right on a small side street.

The first block of this street had smaller shops on both sides—older commercial buildings. I might have seen what those shops were at the time, but all I remember of them is the state they were in. The backs of the buildings on the right faced the parking lot of the bank. I may not have known what kind of shops they were, but I knew they had no back doors. The block was short. I stopped at a stop sign.

This street ran across the back of the bank parking lot. It was a boundary of sorts. Crossing that intersection took me off the small commercial block and into a quiet neighborhood. When I had driven through the night before, there were more cars parked than there were at this mid-morning hour. People do go to work. I had expected it would be easy enough to find space, and it was. I pulled over and parked on an open curb, close enough to a driveway to be sure no one would park in front of me.

I knew that just three blocks up there was another through street where I would be able to make an easy right turn to head back the way I came. That street would get bigger, and busier, and when it got to the freeway less than a mile away it would be big enough to justify the on ramps. A five-minute drive and I would be on the interstate, and gone.

I walked back up the block, still not really noticing or caring about the shops. They didn’t seem to be getting much business. A quiet Tuesday morning in a slightly run-down older commercial district in a small city; just another day in anyplace USA. I wasn’t sure I could really rob a bank, but I was already waking up to the reality that this nondescript everyday anyplace feeling could be found over and over and over. There were banks everywhere.

Turning left, I walked the length of the storefronts. The end unit probably had higher rent because of the exposure on the bigger street. No doubt it was brighter and more cheerful inside with the longer glass frontage. At the back, a wide driveway separated it from the bank. There had probably been another building there once, and an alley between. The bank was newer, built in a time oriented more to cars than pedestrian clientele. The main entrance, with a comfortably wide sidewalk in front, faced this driveway. I crossed and walked in.

There was a manager type at a desk, and two tellers. The bank had been open for about half an hour. People who had to wait for the bank to open out of some urgent need had come and gone, and any sort of lunch rush was still a ways off. I would probably never see a better opportunity. The two tellers were just chatting as I walked straight to the counter since there was no line.

I was scared.

Truth be told, if I could have thought of anything else to say I might have said it. But what do you say when you are in a bank you have no real business in, carrying no identification? It’s not like I could just suddenly have some ordinary reason for being there, conduct some ordinary transaction, and go on my ordinary way. I really was committed.

So I told her, This is a robbery. Put all the money on the counter. I’m sure she was scared too. No doubt she was surprised. When she quickly and efficiently started piling bills on the counter, I was surprised myself. Despite all the thinking and planning, it wasn’t until that moment that I really knew it would work.

I turned away stuffing the wad of bills into my jacket pocket. The manager at the desk didn’t even look up from whatever they were working on as I crossed the lobby to the door and popped back out into the morning air. I turned right, crossed the parking lot to the driveway that led out the back, and as I turned left around the corner of the commercial building, I was out of sight. There were no cars on the street and I wanted that straight line to my car, so I crossed mid block.

That’s the three running steps.

That’s when I hit the ground walking, not running.

That’s when I recognized I had done something I was never going to be able to run away from.

I was just an ordinary guy. How in the hell did this happen?

I

Part One

To Become a Bank Robber, Start by … Selling Cars?

Chapter 1

Inever expected to be a bank robber, or a car salesman. I never expected to be a salesman at all. My experience, my training, everything tilted towards manufacturing. I served in the Navy, and when I got out I got a job as a quality assurance manager for an electronics company. I developed a real dislike for salesmen. They said whatever they needed to say to make a deal, then demanded that the assembly floor produce on time and error free even when they had completely disregarded everything they were told about lead-time requirements.

Then I saw what they were getting paid. That’s when I really got mad at them.

They were the lifeblood of the company, since without them selling stuff there was nothing for the rest of us to do. So kiss their butts, make good on whatever outlandish promises they made, and shut up. One day I was talking to one of our salespeople and he told me to find something I knew anything about and find someone to sell it for. I wasn’t sure I could do that. I didn’t know the first thing about selling, and the only thing I could think of that I knew a lot about was a certain submarine the Navy had introduced me to.

What I did know was that there were a lot of things I didn’t like about my job, so I was definitely looking for something else. In those days there were a few of the modern things just getting started, but for the most part we looked for jobs in the classifieds section of the newspaper. Archaic.

Everybody Needs a Salesman

One day I looked in the classifieds section of my local paper. I usually didn’t bother, since I lived in what I thought of as the borders of nowhere. Palmdale, California, was a commuter town where I saw little hope of getting a job without driving to LA, and those jobs were to be found in the LA Times, not the local rag. I can’t say how the local paper ended up in my hands, but as long as I had it, I’d check for jobs. I found a revelation.

We were the boondocks, but we were fully served with car dealerships. Dealers represented every make of new car, and we had no shortage of used car dealers. Every single one of them had an ad in the paper looking for salesmen. Find something I know about to sell … Well, who doesn’t know at least something about cars? Find someone to sell it for … It looked like everyone in town was trying to find someone to sell cars. But I still didn’t really know how, and all these ads said experienced, except for one.

Among all these ads that were telling me there must be a serious shortage of car salesmen, there was one ad that said experience neither needed nor desired; we want to train you our way. Paid training. What an opportunity!

Welcome to the car business, kid. What a con.

That one dealership with their paid training brought on a new crew of salesmen every three months, regular as a clock. The other dealerships were running their ads just because it was time once again to take on the survivors from the last class. The number of customers doesn’t change, and an experienced salesman doesn’t want to have to compete with a flood of green peas. After three months they were also probably figuring out how badly they were getting pencil whipped.

Pencil whipped is a car business term that refers to the fact that a commission structure can be a nebulous thing. You get a percentage of profit, so a store paying 25% seems obviously better than a store that pays 20%, but how is the profit calculated in the first place? How much is the dealer taking as their cut before the profit you get paid on even starts? Sharpen up your pencils, kids, because you are going to work for the connivingest car man ever to tread the blacktop, and no matter what you think you made, you’ll find out on payday how wrong you were.

Credit where credit is due: he taught us to sell cars. Almost everyone in town working in the car business had started out in the same conference room where I was sitting, learning to sell cars from the ground up. It was a valuable education, since everything I ever made in the car business at least indirectly traced back to those two weeks in a classroom.

But it sure wasn’t free. The trick to the paid training was two weeks in a classroom and then a month on the lot, all at minimum wage. It was pitched as no pressure to sell anything like there will be when you are on commission. That checked out. Car salesmen who don’t sell don’t make money. There is a genuine pressure that sets in when you have been working full time for a couple days, a couple more, a week … and you haven’t sold anything. Only after we were well into working seventy-hour weeks at minimum wage did it click that if we sold three or four cars, we were probably covering our wages. Compared to what the guys who were on commission would have made on those deals, the dealership was getting the same profits on half the payroll, if that. No wonder the experienced guys blew out when they saw us coming. We were taking food off their tables and not even eating it—the dealership was.

I learned to sell cars, and I learned that in the car business there are no friends, no teammates, and no partners other than of convenience. The dealership had to be watched constantly and fought with over every nickel. Front-end profit that my commission was based on would disappear into back-end profit that the finance manager’s commission was based on at the flick of his pencil. A customer asking for one salesman would be told it was their day off and turned into someone else’s commission unless you kept an eye on your fellow salesmen every minute. Every store had a system for determining which salesman got to approach the next customer to come on the lot, and every salesman in every store looked for ways to cheat the system and get more than their share of customers.

Just like everyone else put through that training, I felt cheated. Just like everyone else, I looked for ways to cheat back. I think the surest indicator of who is going to come out of those classes and do well in the car business is who finds a way. I did.

There was a guy who stopped to look at a truck in the middle of my green-pea month. It was a very-hard-to-find truck and the most expensive vehicle on our lot. It wasn’t going to be discounted, and he knew it even better than I knew it. He had been looking for this exact truck, and he knew he wasn’t going to find one anywhere else. He wanted to arrange things so that he could get this gigantic camper he had already lined up included in the deal as an accessory on the truck so he could get it all on one payment, and his bank was getting that sorted out. We talked things out and he went on his way, risking the possibility that someone might buy the truck before the end of the month.

No one did. When he came back on the first, it was my first commissioned sale. My commission was more than my six weeks at minimum wage had been. Everyone knew he hadn’t just walked in on the first day of the month. Everyone in the store knew I had cheated. They just shrugged. I was a car salesman.

Greenest of Peas

I got that first commission voucher and landed my first successful blow against the mighty pencil of the dealership, but I still had a lot to learn about the actual source of the money that we were squabbling over: customers. When I started selling cars, the 1988 models were on the lot, with one notable exception. Ford’s new thing, the futuristic Ford Probe, was out in an early-release 1989 model. The promotion from Ford was wall to wall on television, the dealership was running them in every ad we had in the paper, and everyone from my class was selling Probes left and right while we were still on hours. Everyone but me, because I was in love.

We had this top-end model, a turbocharged GT in a color called midnight garnet metallic. It was a deep maroon with metal flecks that sparkled in the desert sun. The car had every option available—moon roof, extreme sound system. The GT package was not just turbocharged, it included a ground effects kit, air dam, and spoiler that transformed it from a bubble-shaped car of the future into a sleek racer that looked like it belonged on a track. It just screamed to get out and run.

Every customer I ran into that was interested in a Probe, any Probe, drove that GT, and just like me they fell in love with it. Infectious, this love for a car. Of course, it cost almost twice as much as a basic-model Probe, and none of these people were even remotely willing, or in most cases able, to pay for it. But they loved it. And since they loved it, they lost interest in any other Probe I could show them. I couldn’t sell them a different Probe after making them fall in love with that Probe.

I sold cars for two solid months before I ever sold a Ford Probe; that was after I finally figured out that the rules of the car business had reasons behind them. One rule was to show every customer the most basic model available and let them push themselves towards the more expensive model. But the number one rule of being a car salesman was that they are all just rubber, tin, and glass, so never ever fall in love with a car.

That did take some of the fun out of it.

Those early days were still a nonstop laugh riot. Even if I couldn’t fall in love with cars, I really loved customers. In the Navy, I had spent years on a submarine. After that, I had been tucked away in a little office on a factory floor managing a dozen people. The endless stream of people coming through the store was a revelation to me.

There’s a very narrow window you have to pass through to become part of a submarine crew, so in a whole lot of ways we were all alike. Everyone I supervised at the factory had basically the same job and similar history, so again they were a lot alike. The unlimited variety of customers at the dealership was amazing. Every day I got to the lot wondering just how weird the weirdest experience of the day was going to be.

One day this couple comes in looking. I’m showing them around and trying to figure out some subtle way to ask about the bite marks. This woman has at least five really nasty bites, and that’s just where I can see them: three on one arm, one on the other, and one on the side of her neck peeking out from the collar of her T-shirt. They are too narrow and pointed to be human bites. No deep fang marks, so not a dog. All the stupid questions I could be asking …

I find them a car they